Book review: When Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay stood on the summit of Mt Everest more than 70 years ago, did they know they were kicking off a franchise that would remake the peak into the McDonald’s of mountaineering?
In Everest, Inc, outdoors journalist Will Cockrell traces the many highs and lows of Everest exploration since Hillary’s day, following its evolution from grizzled mountaineers battling the odds to today’s comfortable, flash guided tours.
The explosion in climbing numbers is stark: between 1953 and 1992, 394 climbers summitted Everest. Since 1992, 11,500 people and counting have reached the peak, Cockrell writes.
The big reason for this is the massive expansion of the guiding industry. Few today are solo adventurers. The vast majority of the hundreds now at Everest’s Base Camp each season are clients or employees of commercial guide firms.
A May 2019 photo taken by Sherpa Nirmal Pirja that went viral captured dozens lined up on Everest’s highest peak as if they were queuing for a Boxing Day sale. The image, the opposite of romantic ideas of bold, isolated exploration, stunned many – “it was like a zoo”, one climber told The New York Times.
Everest, Inc paints a fascinating picture of how that business evolved, through eccentric characters like Texan businessman Richard Bass, who summited Everest in 1985 with almost no climbing experience but with plenty of guided help. Bass then went on Johnny Carson’s TV show, promoting his “idea of succeeding at things with as little preparation as possible”, as Cockrell puts it.
Guided climbing had existed for centuries, but never on the scale of somewhere like Everest. Bass’s tale and bestselling book Seven Summits kicked open the doors. A humble magazine advertisement in 1989 promoted “guided ascents” of Everest for the first time.
“We heard from all these people who’d done bugger all climbing – just, you know, ‘Hey, I saw your ad, can I come?!” British climber Steve Bell recalls.
Soon, New Zealand guides like Rob Hall and Gary Ball were in the thick of it.
“Guiding not only requires a different set of skills than climbing, its rewards come from an entirely different place,” Cockrell writes.
But guiding became associated with tragedy, too, after the ill-fated 1996 expedition as told in Jon Krakauer’s bestseller Into Thin Air, where Hall and seven others died in a sudden storm.
The massive jump in climbers to Everest actually dates from around that time. “To me, Into Thin Air was the story of a train wreck,” American guide Dave Hahn says. “For a lot of people, Into Thin Air was a how-to book.”
Death continues to haunt Everest, and incidents like an icefall that killed 16 Sherpas in 2014 stick in the public’s memory.
Krakauer, disappointingly, refused to speak to Cockrell for Everest, Inc, but there are plenty of other voices – almost too many. A glossary at the end lists nearly 150 “key players” mentioned in the less than 300-page text.
Cockrell also makes a firm effort to centre the Sherpa narrative in Everest’s story and erase the antiquated stereotype of the smiling, tireless lackey.
Gradually, Sherpas have taken ownership of the business side, with Nepali companies taking the lion’s share of the market. Nirmal Purja, who took the crowded summit photo of 2019, has become a social media superstar known as “Nims”.
New records are still broken all the time – young, old, blind, amputee and climbers of all varieties have made it – and yes, a Sherpa has even reportedly stood nude at the summit.
Today, Everest climbers can enjoy high-speed internet, massages and art classes, their tents kitted out with every possible luxury. Not that every climber wants them, of course.
“There will always be people who don’t want to go on a trip that feels like it’s being led by a boy band,” New Zealand guide company owner Guy Cotter says.
There has been plenty of backlash against the commodification of Everest. Even in the 1970s, adventurer Reinhold Messner – the first to summit Everest without oxygen – said that newer generations “thoughtlessly killed the ideal of the impossible”.
“I think we experienced the best part of climbing history on Everest,” long-time Kiwi guide company owner Russell Brice muses.
Cockrell himself is even-handed in his assessment of the changing monolith. Everest, Inc is never about pining for “the good old days”.
Still, while Cockrell excels at explaining the evolution of Everest, he rarely captures the awe of the experience itself. Krakauer’s narrative may be controversial among Everest buffs, but there’s no denying that Into Thin Air was a rip-roaring read that made you feel the brutal, hypnotic chill of the peak’s allure.
Cockrell is more interested in how the impossible mountain became a story of ambition, capitalism and compromise to allow as many people as possible to achieve their Everest dreams.
Despite the “firsts” dwindling, Everest still casts its spell. One Sherpa asks, “Why is it Westerners come to Everest looking for something they did not lose here?”
That’s a question perhaps nobody can answer, but Cockrell’s fine survey of the mountain’s ever-changing public face helps explain why, decades after Sir Ed’s feat, so many can’t stop looking to Everest and hoping to find some part of themselves there at the top of the world.
